Paul McKee

Professionally I took a very non-traditional path which many people find very interesting. Lots of funny stories along the way. Here's my quick sum up:

I graduated college when the web was just becoming a thing. I had zero interest in pursuing a career in engineering (what I went to school for). So I learned to put people's business cards on a website and it was a little business that paid off both my and wife's student loans.

I then decided to be a teacher. The business card thing started losing legs. I taught in K-12 schools in New York State for 10 years.

I put those 2 together (teaching and web development) and built a web page for my classroom. That little web page got so many visitors that the school had to shut down my web page because it was crippling their network.

I realized the demand for teaching resources online from that experience and I went on to found Teach-nology. Which was one of the premiere K-12 teaching resource sites in 2000s to mid-2010s.

I ended up selling that network and a portfolio of websites to a large media company. I worked for them for several years and they owned about 80% of all the teacher resource sites back at that time. They also had an Ad tech company, so I learned a ton of the behind the scenes with display ads and email newsletters.

After being let go by that firm, I tried to retire. I quickly learned that retirement is not for me, I needed purpose. After meeting a number of new teachers, I quickly realized that these young people are paying for monthly or annual subscriptions to all the platforms I built in the past.

My new purpose is FreeWorksheets.com where all of the resources are 100% free. This gives me purpose and what ever extra money from display ads I have each month goes to pay retired teachers to write all of the materials you will find.

I expect to spend a few years to really build this out and then I'll tackle another problem that teachers are dealing with everyday. Giving back is what my time is dedicated to now.